Probably not the smartest idea to ask our opinion Teker, I suspect we will be equally divided. You will probably just need to choose one option yourself in the end. I think the original idea is that when the mud is reloaded, it reloads as much as possible how it was. Option 1 breaks with that idea and it encourages the mud to be crashed in the hope Cthulhu or Flame etc loads on boot and whats already loaded will be lost. Option 2 is the most true to the original idea with one flaw in the fact mobs that are dead at reboot will be empty.

Could there be an option 3?

Mobs that were dead at time of reboot, are respawned with a chance to load.Mobs that had items at the time of reboot, are reloaded with items they already had.

I don't know how possible it is to keep a list of dead mobs in the same manner you save the eq on the mobs. Option 3 is the purest idea in that, as much as possible the mud would continue in the state it was before reboot. Another thing is that the mobs pop unaged... but seriously how can we complain given what you've done to fix the situation already. Thanks very much.

Option #1 was tried 20 + years ago and led to the game being intentionally crashed. Giving the option for tons of high level equipment to pop, even though the majority of mobs were not cycled or dead at the time of crash/reboot, doesn't make much sense to me!